MEDAL Project concludes after three years

Over the course of the project, MEDAL delivered a range of training activities, developed international collaborations, and provided support for early-career researchers. To mark the conclusion of the project, an article and a short documentary have been published. These reflect on MEDAL’s work and outline its main activities and outcomes over the past three years. If you want to learn more about the challenges of setting up an international consortium or reminisce about MEDAL, you can watch it here.

Currently, we are working on a new section of the website that will bring together materials produced during the project, including presentations, lectures, and other related content. This section is intended to make these resources available for future reference. We invite readers to revisit MEDAL’s work and explore the published materials reflecting on the project’s activities and achievements.

Read below’s wrap-up to find out more about MEDAL.

Who were MEDAL?

As the name suggests, MEDAL’s focus was on the diversity of methods used in linguistics. It was set up as a training school for early-career researchers in order to gain skills trhough collaborative research, mentorship opportunities, and training events. MEDAL was a collaborative effort consisting of Steering Committee members Virve Vihman, Joshua Wilbur, Liina Lindström, Caroline Rowland, Aslı Özyürek, Dagmar Divjak, Petar Milin, Judith Holler, and Hatice Zora, and project managers Taavi Vanaveski, Izabela Jordanoska, Justyna Mackiewicz, Sevilay Sengül, Anastasia Chuprina (until summer 2024), and Doğus Okusz (until summer 2023). For two Steering Committee members, MEDAL has proven to be a good omen; both Virve Vihman and Judith Holler got their professorships during the MEDAL days. 

Project leader Virve Vihman, Professor of Psycholinguistics at the University of Tartu

Showcasing the work of early-career researchers

MEDAL has been instrumental in empowering early-career researchers in linguistics. Several PhD students have used the mobility opportunities for summer school or mentorship visits. For example Tartu’s Aet Kuusik and Elisabeth Kaukonen have come to Nijmegen, while Magda Matetovici went from Nijmegen to Birmingham. 

There have been a total of 22 workshops, varying from topics such as dealing with imposter syndrome, to Bayesian regression, to grant writing. In the scope of the MEDAL project, Tartu and Nijmegen were even visited by internet celebrity and language science communicator Gretchen McCulloch. The more intensive methods training took place during the summer schools, the first of which took place in Tartu, and was on corpus linguistics, the second dealt with experimental linguistics and took place here in Nijmegen, while the last summer school was in Birmingham and on computational modelling. 

The ultimate finale of the training schools was MEDAL’s conference ‘New Challenges, Novel Approaches’, which took place on the 9th and 10th of October 2025, and was the ideal place for the early-career researchers to showcase what they have learned over the past three years. You can read a short summary of the conference by PhD student Adele Vaks here. Medals have been rewarded to outstanding early-career researchers, many of which from MPI. 

Loïs Dona, Hasan Dikyuva, Magda Matetovici, and Annika Kängsepp have received awards for their presentations at the final conference, while Ezgi Mamus, Sho Akamine, Dorjderem Byambasuren, Laura Patrizzi, Maria Reile, and Jesse Holmes have received medals for participating in all three summer schools. To put these promising researchers in a spotlight, MEDAL has conducted interviews with them about their work and their dreams for the future, which you can read here:

interview with Loïs, Hasan, Magda, and Annika
interview Jesse 
interview with Sho 
interview with Dojderem

In addition, researchers at partner institutes have been involved in collaborative projects. A short summary of the projects with links to further reading can be found here. For more details or collaboration ideas, you are welcome to contact the individual researchers! 

Medal recipients at the Birmingham summer school, from left to right: Dorjderem Byambasuren, Jesse Holmes, Laura Patrizzi, Ezgi Mamus, Sho Akamine, and Maria Reile

Medal recipients at the Tartu conference, from left to right: Loïs Dona, Hasan Dikyuva, Magda Matetovci, and Annika Kängsepp

Beyond academia

MEDAL’s tagline ‘empower the next generation of linguistics’ is not just about early-career researchers, but also the even earlier-career researchers: secondary school students. Thus, in addition to the many training schools, MEDAL has also been involved in public outreach. MPI was specifically in charge for the outreach and dissemination portion of the project, coordinated by project manager Izabela Jordanoska. Within the MEDAL project, two outreach events on language science have been organised at the MPI in Nijmegen, and one in Tartu. In addition, MEDAL was featured at popular science festivals InScience and Kletskoppen. This outreach effort has even led to the creation of a resources page targeted at high school teachers. This page is still in the works, and is to be hosted on the MPI website, so stay updated!

Project manager Izabela Jordanoska presenting at the InScience Film Festival in Nijmegen

What’s next for MEDAL?

While the project may have come to an end, MEDAL’s legacy will live on. All of the training materials used in the workshops and summer schools are being collected and hosted on MEDAL’s OSF page. They will be available for the broader linguistic community to make use of. In a final survey conducted by MEDAL, many respondents have indicated that there is a need for projects focusing on skills advancement and research support, with statements like “Just continue similar incentives”. A ‘cousin’ of the MEDAL project is the newly-launched project ‘Center for Digital Text Scholarship’ (DigiTS) at the University of Tartu, a project focused on the advancement of Digital Humanities in all aspects of society. If you miss MEDAL already, you can keep up to date with some of its members by following DigiTS on Bluesky. Finally, the MEDAL team would like to extend their gratitude to everyone who helped make this project a success!

The kick-off of the DigiTS project, featuring MEDAL veterans Joshua Wilbur, seated, far left, and Liina Lindström, standing, middle